Wednesday, August 12, 2009

"Eat me! EAT! ME!"

1. An opening in chess in which a minor piece, or pieces, usually a pawn, is offered in exchange for a favorable position.

2. A maneuver, stratagem, or ploy, especially one used at an initial stage.

3. A remark intended to start a conversation or make a telling point.

Men in Black.

Kay: Keep him on THIS planet.

Jay: Kay, where are you going?

Kay: I'm going to get my gun back. . .

Kay to Bug: You're nothing but a smear on the sports page to me, you slimy, ugly, intestinal parasite! Eat me! EAT! ME!

[The Bug swallows Kay whole]

Jay: Kay! Kay!

I was talking over present events on the blog and around the country with a very good friend the other day, and he was urging me to back off on the direct affronts to the ATF and its armed bureaucrats. Affronts like this, and this, and this.

He couldn't believe that every time I write something about a specific ATF employee, I send them a copy to their work emails.

"Well," I explained, "You don't want me to say stuff behind their backs that I wouldn't say to their faces, do you?" I smiled.

He looked at me with exasperation.

"Damn, Mike, you know what you remind me of?"

"What's that?"

"Remember in Men in Black where Kay insults the interstellar cockroach and yells, 'Eat me! Eat me!'?"

I laughed.

He said, "It ain't funny, boy. Sooner or later they WILL eat you. Why the hell do you keep tempting them?"

"Gambit."

He's a chess player and he knew what I was saying. After a moment he commented.

"Pretty damn hard on the pawn, though."

"Yeah," I answered. "Probably so. But if it's the only way to kill the cockroach? Besides, somebody's got to be the pawn, might as well be me. You know what they say, 'never ask your troops to do something you won't do yourself.'"

"We don't have that many 'troops,'" he pointed out. "Not that are ready to go now."

"Well, that's the whole point, isn't it?" I replied. "If there was somebody else able to do the job, I'd let them. But there isn't."

We both paused, thinking.

"Besides," I offered, "you don't think they're that stupid to make an example of me, do you?"

He looked at me and shook his head.

"Yeah, I do. They ARE that stupid."

Here's the conundrum for the ATF under the regime of the Obamanoids:

a. On the one hand, they know that they will face no rigorous oversight if they try to pull another Waco, on me or anybody else. On the other hand, they cannot predict what the reaction of the armed citizenry will be, especially that of the Three Percenters. They may despise us and pooh pooh us as a countervailing threat, BUT THEY CANNOT BE SURE.

b. On the one hand, they really hate what I and some of my friends are doing to them and saying about them. Not that we are breaking the law, mind you, just that we are pointing out how THEY are breaking the law. On the other hand, if they DO anything about that they will just spread our message farther and wider.

Here's the plain facts of it. My website gets only 2 to 3 thousand hits a day, sometimes less. In Internet terms, why should that bother them? It's nothing. Miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Yet we know, from various sources, that it does, greatly.

Why?

Because they cannot abide, personally and institutionally, citizens standing up to them, unafraid. It sets a bad example for the other people they try to bully. While tactically they can concentrate enough strength to botch a dynamic entry raid a la Waco (where they backed away without ammo, with their hands in the air, at the Davidians' sufferance), strategically they have always been a big, bad bluff -- "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Numerically, when compared to even three percent of American gun owners, it is THEY who are statistically insignificant.

That is their PRIMAL fear -- that one day the ants will figure out that they outnumber the grasshoppers a hundred to one, even a thousand to one, and if even a fraction of us act together, their bully-boy gravy train, the possibility of their cushy retirement, even, perhaps, they themselves, WILL CEASE TO EXIST.

A smart chess player, especially playing on a board with flesh and blood pieces, one of which is his own, will, when confronted with a gambit, decline to be stupid. He might even consider the board, look at the cost, and be willing to call it a draw.

That is my hope.

That is, indeed, my prayer.

But if they are determined that the game must begin, I want them to make the worst mistake possible. I am willing to risk the gambit. If they take it, they will lose in the end.

That is why I do what I do.

So, to whom it may concern:

EAT ME.

Mike VanderboeghThe alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.

Mike,You are, and have been, "pushing your luck" with the ATF. I have been reading your blog for appox 2 years and agree with most of what you say. I do not agree with your position of waiting for them to come take you away. If they do come to arrest you for whatever charge they can invent, go quietly.Resisting the henchmen is futile.Waco fueled the Oklahoma city bombing by Mcviegh. Stupid mistake! Killing workers and children in a daycare put Mcveigh at the same level the ATF thugs are. Targeting the puppetmaster would have been more appropiate,and quite frankly more effective. The policy makers would be reminded that they are not above justice. Living in their ivory towers has given them a sense of invulnerability. Pop their balloon, and we will see much quicker reform.Paul

You say "resisting the henchmen is futile." The answer to that is in a quote from Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn:

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We didn’t love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."

Mike, All I can say to Cheyenne 0317 is "Semper Fidelis, my brother" You are very lucky to have a guardian angel. As a former S-2 Scout myself and then a 0321 Recon Marine, I know how he feels. I truly believe men join the Marine Corps because of a belief system in being a "dog soldier" for the tribe. It is our duty to protect others in the group. Which brings me to another related idea. With big brother tightening the noose and breathing down our backs, perhaps they should understand that for every one of us they want to take out, 10 or 100 more of us will step up and fulfill Cheyenne's promise. As you have told us many times, rocks and phone books are very easy to come by. I believe all of us Oath-Keepers and 3'pers should start forming closer ties with our local brethren, if for nothing more than to start covering each others backs. I know this may be hard to do, but we have to tighten our perimeter. And expand the brotherhood. It's also high time these gestapo thugs start seeing they can no longer bully us, we also have teeth. 2 years ago my 81 year old dying mother returned to Idaho from Hawaii to spend her last days at my sisters house. She was taken aside in Spokane and strip searched, then held for quite some time, while no one in our family had any idea where she was. She missed her flight and was put up in a hotel by the airline while my sisters were frantically calling everywhere to try to locate her. Late that evening she called to let them know where she was. She passed away from cancer a month later. I did not hear about this for several months or they would have had to pry me off some airport goons body. This can no longer happen in America!! We must put them in their place as the civil servants that they are and not some god on a pedestal who look down on us as trash to kick around. I know not everyone was a Marine or a Ranger but you men have to reach down and confirm you still have a set hanging there. Then ask yourself what you will do to protect your loved ones and live by it. Semper Fidelis, Sig.

The ATF should keep its mouth closed and head low. I believe we are getting close to a second revolution as it is. The people are getting tired of the government taxes, corruption, and ignoring the Constitution. There are thousands of us that want to bring the government back into the confines of the Constitution. We are just waiting for the government to do something stupid enough to push us into action. That action might be a movement against a leader like you.

If the people were tired of taxes, corruption and the ignoring of the Constitution, the second revolution would have started long ago. One courageous person showed up openly armed at the Obama town hall meeting in a state thats motto is "Live Free or Die." Where were all of the Oath-Keepers and 3'pers? Maybe he was all.

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

On the efficacy of passive resistance in the face of the collectivist beast. . .

Had the Japanese got as far as India, Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass. -- Mike Vanderboegh.

In the future . . .

When the histories are written, “National Rifle Association” will be cross-referenced with “Judenrat.” -- Mike Vanderboegh to Sebastian at "Snowflakes in Hell"

"Smash the bloody mirror."

If you find yourself through the looking glass, where the verities of the world you knew and loved no longer apply, there is only one thing to do. Knock the Red Queen on her ass, turn around, and smash the bloody mirror. -- Mike Vanderboegh

From Kurt Hoffman over at Armed and Safe.

"I believe that being despised by the despicable is as good as being admired by the admirable."

From long experience myself, I can only say, "You betcha."

"Only cowards dare cringe."

The fears of man are many. He fears the shadow of death and the closed doors of the future. He is afraid for his friends and for his sons and of the specter of tomorrow. All his life's journey he walks in the lonely corridors of his controlled fears, if he is a man. For only fools will strut, and only cowards dare cringe. -- James Warner Bellah, "Spanish Man's Grave" in Reveille, Curtis Publishing, 1947.

"We fight an enemy that never sleeps."

"As our enemies work bit by bit to deconstruct, we must work bit by bit to REconstruct. Be mindful where we should be. Set goals. We fight an enemy that never sleeps. We must learn to sleep less." -- Mike H. at What McAuliffe Said

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.